Posts tagged TextMessaging

It's a sad day in the cellphone world. Matti Makkonen, widely considered the "father of SMS," has died from illness at the age of 63. The Finnish creator pitched the concept of text messaging over cellular networks in 1984 and helped get the ball rolling on the technology in its earliest days....

We hope you didn't lean too heavily on Google Calendar's text message alerts in order to keep your life organized. Google is warning that Calendar's SMS notifications will vanish for regular users (education, government and work are safe) after June 27th. The search firm argues that they're no l...

You've had the option of texting 911 in a handful of US cities for a couple of months, thanks in part to voluntary efforts from bigger cellphone carriers. However, the FCC doesn't want you to be left out solely because you're on a smaller network. The agency has just adopted rules requiring that a...

Android users worried that the government is spying on their smartphone now have a new privacy option: CyanogenMod. Starting with today's nightly 10.2 build, the custom firmware will encrypt SMS and MMS messages sent to any device using the TextSecure protocol, including fellow Cyanogen users. Use...

Watch out if someone sends a flood of text messages to your Nexus phone -- they may be trying to break in or otherwise cause havoc. IT administrator Bogdan Alecu has discovered an Android bug that triggers exploitable behavior in the Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 whenever they're hit by a larg...

Among the many surprise costs that annoy cellphone owners, unwanted text message service fees can be the worst; they're hard to stop, and not always worth the effort. Those fees may not irk many US subscribers after today, though -- AT&amp;T, Sprint and T-Mobile now stop "problematic" premium SMS...

With iOS 7 officially out of the bag, there is no shortage of tips coming in highlighting many of the new tweaks users can expect to see in Apple's new mobile OS.
One particularly welcome addition to iOS 7 is the ability to view timestamps for individual text messages. To do so, simply swipe to the...

In a fascinating post from Kelly Jacklin, the long time Apple software engineer details how he helped create the default text alert sound on the iPhone -- now known as the "Tri-tone" alert.
The history of the the pleasant chime we've all come to know and love stretches all the way back to 1998, nea...

Many Android-based Google Voice users don't like having to use the official Google Voice app for text messaging, especially when its performance can be flaky. They now have some choice courtesy of experimental code from ClockworkMod's Koushik Dutta. His test release lets those running CyanogenMod...

If you thought you were driving safe when activating your voice-to-text service or starting up Siri, a survey by the Texas Transportation Institute suggests it might dull your reactions just as much as finger-based typing. The study compared traditional text messaging with voice-to-text and found...

You might remember Zipwhip from its SMS-enabled espresso machine, but the outfit's hoping a new feature added to its cloud-based text-messaging platform will catch your attention this time around. In case you're not familiar with Zipwhip's non-caffeinated affairs, it allows texts to be sent throug...

Facebook Messenger might as well be as ubiquitous as SMS text messaging for some, but there's a catch to getting everyone to agree: despite there being over a billion Facebook users, not everyone is able (or willing) to fire up a social networking profile to get started. Some of the Android users...